Why the Porn Show and ces Happen the Same Week in Vegas

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I suppose there’s no such thing as a “normal” week in Las Vegas. As I was walking down the strip last night, going from one meeting to the next, I was attempting to explain my surrounds, trying to come up with a succinct description for the sensation of walking past the Eiffel Tower one moment and then the canals of Venice and the warring pirate ships the next.

The best description I could come up with was, “imagine that some supervillian had collected up all of the world’s most famous monuments and dumped them in a few miles of one another,”

That said, even with that manner of odd spectacle encountered on a daily basis, there’s something special about the second week of the year, when two distinctly different groups descend upon the city. On one side are the technology enthusiasts, booking hotel rooms for the country’s biggest technology show. On the other are members and fans of the adult industry descending upon the Sands for the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo.

It always seemed to me that it couldn’t possibly be a coincidence that these two seemingly polarizing shows occur in the same city on the same week. This year, I spoke with a spokesman for the AVN show and got the answer–it’s no coincidence at all. AVN was actually born out of ces.

“It came out of ces, about 12 years ago,” AVN rep Sean Devlin told Gearlog. “There used to be an adult video section of the show. And then, about 12 years ago, the adult exhibitors said, ‘hey, we can do our own show.’ So they decided to put on their own show. So that’s how the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo was born.”

It was all born in a basement–figuratively and literally. “Instead of being the redheaded stepchild of ces, the show’s organizers wanted to get out of the basement,” explained Devlin. “I’m told that it was in the dark basement–literally in the show’s basement. They wanted to come out in the sunshine.”

So, why keep it the same week as ces, after all these years? Tradition–and foot traffic. “A good maybe 40 percent of the fan attendees also attend ces. It is an important part of our market. It used to be part of ces, and people expect it to be at the same time as ces. We don’t always overlap all four days like we did this year, but we usually overlap at least two days.”